Re: switch between utf-8 and latin-1 (ARGH!!)

[?manu* <paolNOini@math.SPAMunifi.it>]

Thank you so much. I have spent maybe one or two hours to understand 
what was happening to my buffers. I tell you because it's a little bit 
funny.

I open my buffer with UTF-8 encoding, and i see all the multibyte 
characters scrambled. Then I insert the line -*- coding:utf-8 -*- at the 
beginning and I save the buffer. Then I exit emacs and reopen the 
buffer. Apparently nothing has changed.

What was happening was that after I write that line on the buffer, when 
I save the buffer emacs converted the utf-8 escape characters in utf-8 
(this seems a wrong behaviour to me!). Looking with hexdump I can see 
that the original two bytes characters become four bytes.

The only solution I found was to use another editor to insert that 
line!!! This is awkward!

E.

Pascal J. Bourguignon ha scritto:
> ?manu* <paolNOini@math.SPAMunifi.it> writes:
> 
>> . what method does emacs use to guess the encoding of a text file?
>>
>> . what is the command to tell emacs that the file in the buffer is
>>   utf-8 instead of latin-1?
> 
> M-x set-buffer-file-coding-system
> (Usually bound to C-x RET f)
> 
> 
>> . is it possible to insert some text in the file (in comments)
>> to tell emacs which encoding to use?
> 
> Insert the coding File Variable:
> 
> Put:  -*- coding:utf-8; -*-
> on one of the first two lines,
> 
> or put:
> 
> Local Variables:
> coding: utf-8
> End:
> 
> in the last 512 bytes of the file.
>